My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 144

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Who is Aiden’s Father

~Julian-

She sat at her desk for a long time after I told her about Aiden.

Not moving. Not speaking. Just sitting with whatever she was sitting with, her hands flat on the desk, her eyes on a point somewhere past the screen in front of her. The server room hummed. Outside, Brooklyn had fully woken up the sounds of the city coming through at a distance, muffled by the walls of the warehouse.

I let her have it.

I went back to my workstation and closed out the final security report and sent it to Reid and did not push. I had learned something about Katia over forty–eight hours and a year of boardrooms and Dubai and a car park in November – she processed things in her own time and in her own order, and the worst thing you could do was try to hurry her through it.

So I waited.

At six fifteen she stood up, got a coffee, and came back and sat down. She looked at me across the server room.

“Thank you,” she said. “For telling me.”

“Of course,” I said.

She looked at her coffee. I looked at my screen.

Then I said it.

“Who is his father?”

Not loudly. Not with any weight or agenda attached to it. Just the question, quietly, in a room that was already quiet, at six in the morning when neither of us had slept enough to be guarded about anything.

She looked at me.

For a long time she looked at me, and I looked back, and neither of us said anything. I watched something move through her expression – not fear, not anger. The particular stillness of someone deciding how much of a true thing to give.

ars ago.”

“A man I met in Vegas,” she said. “Six years ago.”

I said nothing.

“I don’t remember his face,” she said. “I was given something that night that I shouldn’t have been given.” She paused. “I don’t know who arranged it. I don’t know if it was deliberate. I just know that the night I should have remembered clearly- I don’t. Not most of it.”

My jaw tightened.

I kept my face still.

I knew exactly what she meant. I knew because the same thing had happened to me. Because Zane had come to me the morning after with the expression of a man who had done something he could not undo and had spent the night deciding how to say it. Because I had spent six years angry about a night I remembered only in pieces – warmth; laughter, the weight of a ring on a hand I don’t remember, and a face I could not reconstruct no matter how many times I tried.

She had been given the same thing.

By the same person, in the same room, on the same night, probably.

I sat with that.

She was looking at her coffee again. She did not know what I knew. She did not know that I had been in that room. She did not

Who is Aidan’s father

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know that the man she didn’t remember was sitting six feet away from her at a workstation in Brooklyn with her son’s voice still in his ear and her ring somewhere in a safe in his study.

She didn’t know any of it.

“I looked for him,” she said quietly. “After. When I found out about Aiden. I had nothing to go on.” She paused. “I stopped looking eventually. I decided it was better for Alden to have one parent who was completely present than two parents where one was a stranger I had to find.” She looked up. “He doesn’t know about Aiden. Wherever he is. He doesn’t know he has a son.”

The server room was very quiet.

I thought about Aiden’s voice on the phone. I’m already a little bit clever now. The absolute certainty of it. The confidence of a child who had been raised by someone who made him feel like being himself was enough.

I thought about the jaw. The hands. The way his head tilted left.

I thought: he doesn’t know he has a son.

I thought: I do.

I looked at Katia across the room.

She looked back at me.

And neither of us said what we were both beginning to think.

I could see it – not clearly, not completely, but the shape of it arriving in her expression. The way she was looking at me now was slightly different from the way she had been looking at me five minutes ago. Something had shifted. Something had moved closer to the surface.

She picked up her bag.

“I should get back,” she said. “Aiden will be awake.

“Yes,” I said.

She stood. She put the strap of her bag over her shoulder. She looked at me once more

that look, the one that had something

in it that was almost a question, almost an answer, almost something she was not ready to say out loud yet.

“Julian,” she said.

“Katia,” I said.

Whatever she had been about to say, she put back down. She nodded once and walked out.

I listened to her footsteps down the corridor. The door at the end opening and closing.

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